Dr. Daniella Molle '97:

Interview by Petia Ivanova ’97

Daniella Molle or Dani as I know her, a fellow classmate of the Class of 1997, is a truly remarkable individual, embodying a rare combination of kindness and fortitude. In 2023, she established the Robin Mittenthal Scholarship at ACS, which covers the full tuition fee for the education of one Bulgarian student for the complete five-year term of education, offered with preference to a student from a minority, from a single-parent household or residing outside of Sofia, whose family has high financial needs. As Research Director at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, she conducts qualitative research that can inform professional learning initiatives specifically designed for teachers of multilingual students. She is interested in designing and exploring different approaches to working with educators to support the academic success of multilingual students. She is involved in investigations of what educators learn during professional development, how they put that knowledge into practice, and how their practice facilitates the academic literacy development of multilingual students. She earned her doctoral degree from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was an honor to converse with Dani about ACS, her life after graduation, parenting, education, and social justice.

Dani, what have you been up to since graduating ACS in 1997?

After I graduated from ACS, I went on to study Scandinavian Studies at Sofia University. I knew even before graduating, though, that teaching languages was my passion. My mother is a professor of Bulgarian as a foreign language at Sofia University, the linguist in the family. My dad is an applied mathematician. He does a lot of statistics work and was also a professor at Sofia University before transferring to the University of Forestry. I think I got the linguistics gene from my mom and with the huge demand for lessons in English in Bulgaria back then, I started working for an organization that provided instruction in English to its employees as soon as I graduated high school. Later, I moved to another organization and taught Business English to people working for Shell, Sofia Airport, etc. And I really enjoyed that.

In 2003, when I was done with the Bachelor’s and Master’s in Scandinavian Studies, I wanted to continue teaching English, but I felt that I didn’t have enough training on how to be a good teacher. While an effective teacher, I was mostly improvising with no theory or formal training on teaching language. I really wanted to learn more and be a better teacher. And since I did not want to study pedagogy here in Bulgaria, nor did I want to join the English Department at Sofia University, both too traditional and too set in their ways for me, I started looking for places where I could pursue a Master’s degree in teaching English as an additional language and get financial support. I looked at the UK, Australia, and the US. It was very clear from the very beginning that England wouldn’t work out. Australia, too, was difficult for an international student, while the US was easier. I looked at rankings and specifically at rankings for programs that focused on teaching English as an additional language. One of the programs was actually here at University of Wisconsin – Madison. So I applied there and to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, because they had a whole department focused on teaching English as an additional language. Madison admitted me, but with no guarantee for funding whereas the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign admitted me with guaranteed funding. So I was accepted as a teaching assistant (or TA), which means that my tuition was paid, I received a monthly stipend, and had health insurance. In other words, I could pursue my studies and be financially independent.

I came to the United States with the idea to get a Master’s degree, and then return to Sofia and continue teaching English to adults. I really enjoyed the private company that I was working for before I left for the US. I felt valued and appreciated there. Coming here, I was terrified when I found out that I would have to teach academic writing. I had taught a lot of English and I was comfortable teaching English, but I had no preparation for teaching academic writing, which was what I was going to be a TA for. We had just one week of orientation and I felt there was no way this was sufficient for me. I had a lot of freedom in terms of how I taught the curriculum. The students were international graduate students and our department, the Department of English as an International Language, provided academic writing support to them as they were pursuing their careers in their fields: engineering, music, architecture, you name it. Writing is a big part of their academic careers. I started reading a lot to prepare and I went to the library a lot, which is where I met my future husband Robin, two days after I arrived.

It turned out that I loved teaching writing. I had never experienced this before but I loved it. At the end of the two-year Master’s program, I had a choice of taking exams or writing a thesis to get a Master’s degree. And I decided to write a thesis. I wanted to pursue a question that was of interest to me rather than learn a lot of content related to stuff that other people thought I should be knowledgeable about. Because of my love for writing and since I was to teach writing, I had taken courses in the English Department in Composition and Rhetoric. There I met the person who became my advisor, who is amazing. Having a background in English as an additional language, he understood where I was coming from. He was a leading scholar in Composition and Rhetoric, very well known in the field and extremely supportive. I loved working with him.

I wanted to pursue a question that was of interest to me rather than learn a lot of content related to stuff that other people thought I should be knowledgeable about.

The experience of writing my thesis in the second year of my Master’s was completely transformative because it showed me that I loved research even more than I loved teaching. Up to that point, I thought I would be a teacher all my life. You know, I was good at it, loved it, and wanted to teach language. That’s what I wanted to do. After that, I thought to myself, Oh my goodness, there is something even more fascinating than teaching and that’s doing research.

At that point, I was in a committed relationship and I felt like my original plan of getting a degree and going back to Bulgaria to teach was changing. Robin and I decided to get married and then I applied to doctoral programs. One of the doctoral programs that admitted me was UW-Madison. Another one where I really wanted to go was the University of Toronto, where they have the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, a very well known institute for research. And I had loved the research on multilingual students coming out of there, but I was on the waiting list and didn’t make it. So I moved here, to UW-Madison, where I also had a teaching assistantship. I continued teaching writing to undergraduates. The English Department here was very happy to have me as a TA because they rarely have students who have experience teaching writing. Then I did my doctoral work for five years and had my son in the meantime. I graduated in 2010.

In Madison, I realized that even though I had spent two years in Urbana learning how to teach English, none of the discussions I had heard there were about teaching as a political action, a colonial action in particular. There was no discussion of power, of what it means to teach a dominant language in a country that behaves in many ways like a monolingual country. When I came to Madison, there were a lot of leading senior scholars who were very political. I had classes with leading scholars in critical race theory and in newer versions of Marxist theory.

I couldn’t believe that I had studied how to teach language for two years and never had conversations about how the teaching of anything, and language in particular, is extremely political: how we choose to teach it, the messages we convey about the language, how we address variations like dialects, accents, etc. I just couldn’t believe it. I’ve always appreciated my education at UW-Madison because of that, because I learned about power. I did my dissertation here and through my dissertation, I got connected with an organization that serves multilingual students. It’s called WIDA. It is part of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and is housed at the UW-Madison School of Education. WIDA produces standards and assessments for multilingual students in over 40 states. I was a graduate student for them and I did my doctoral work on a professional development that they provided, because I discovered that I was most interested in adult learning. I wanted to study how adults learn and especially how teachers learn to change their practice and serve multilingual kids better. I wanted to understand the role of language in learning and that was what my doctoral work was about. It was working with teachers, exploring a professional learning opportunity that was provided by WIDA.

After I graduated, WIDA hired me right away, which was fantastic. I had a young child and did not want to move. Madison, especially for a middle class white family, is a wonderful place to grow up, to raise kids. Indeed, there is a lot of inequity in our city and we’re trying to make it a better place for other folks as well but we have a long way to go. I wanted to stay, and I started working for WIDA as a staff researcher, a qualitative researcher, because I had used only qualitative methods for my work. I worked there for 11 years and I really, really enjoyed it.

I loved working as a researcher. To scratch the itch of teaching and to contribute to my local community, I also taught at a local college. I taught courses for practicing teachers in linguistics and language development. And I worked as a supervisor of practicum students, which meant that I visited my students in their classrooms. I would go and observe teachers teach in schools, and then give them feedback. And then as part of my work for WIDA, I facilitated a lot of professional learning. I designed professional learning and I co-facilitated with teachers at the school. I conducted a research study at one school for two years to see how adults change their practice, how they change the way they think about what multilingual kids can do, and how they change their practice to integrate language instruction with subject area instruction. If you’re teaching math, for example, how do you teach math and develop students’ language at the same time, how do you teach it in a way that offers opportunities for students who may not be fully proficient in English to participate and show how much they know, things like that.

I had to learn a lot. I learned a lot about teaching math. I learned a lot about teaching science, the standards for science. As a language educator, I think language is a tool. Language proficiency for me has never been a goal in and of itself. We’re not teaching kids to be proficient just to be proficient. We want them to be proficient so they can achieve their own goals. We work in service of their goals, in service of their learning across the content areas. When you’re in this service position, I think we need to do a lot of learning about what is important in social studies, in language arts, in science. The next generation science standards came out while I was still engaged in this work. So I learned a lot about those and the kind of shifts in teaching practice that they wanted. As language educators, we do need to do our best to constantly learn about what it means to learn in a discipline, what the people who are focused on the discipline really care about, and what the kinds of learning that they see as really effective learning are, so we can then support kids in engaging in that kind of learning. I loved it.

Then two years ago, I moved because the culture of the organization changed and I didn’t have the freedom that I wanted and needed. There wasn’t as much room for innovation and creativity. I started looking for a new job just when the person who is now my supervisor, a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rich Halverson, had just gotten a very large grant from the Wallace Foundation and was looking for a research director for that grant. So the timing was just perfect. He had never been my professor but we knew of one another, so he approached me and said, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a researcher; do you know of someone who may be willing to change what they’re doing, spread their wings a little bit?’ I transitioned and became the research director for this $8 million grant. For education, that’s a big chunk of money, a six-year grant.

Now, we’re in our third year and I have absolutely loved it. It’s been such an opportunity for growth for me because I’ve had to learn how to relate to others and form relationships with people in very different roles: funders, other research partners, people on our research team, and graduate students. It’s been a huge learning opportunity in maintaining relationships and bringing about and sustaining partnerships. I feel that from an HR perspective, I have grown so much. The people I work most closely with, like Rich Halverson, my supervisor and the project manager for our grant, are fantastic and we get along wonderfully. So it’s a joy.

One of the best things about this opportunity was that I just moved four floors. I’m still at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. I’m still doing research. I just moved down to a different office in the same building. We did not have to move houses or anything like that which is great because my son was very much opposed to moving. My daughter thought we could move as long as the cat moved with us, but not my teenage son.

A lot you have been up to since graduating ACS in 1997. And then in the summer of 2023 you contacted us at the American College looking for ways to contribute to the ACS Scholarship Fund.

Yes, I’ve always felt that my time at the College was transformative. At ACS, I learned that my opinion was important and I could think critically and ask questions; that I as an individual have thoughts and ideas that matter. And that I’m allowed to – and not just allowed – encouraged to ask questions. I feel like there hasn’t been anything more transformative than that: feeling seen as an individual, as a very young scholar, and encouraged to ask questions. And so I’ve always wanted to give back as a way to acknowledge the transformative power of education at this particular institution and pass it forward. It’s something that I have always, always wanted to do.

I myself have benefited from scholarships a lot. While at ACS, I spent my junior year in California through financial support from the Soros Foundation. After my Master’s, I wouldn’t have been able to come to the US without the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign funding me and giving me a job as a teaching assistant. These experiences showed me that there is power in individuals supporting other individuals, that certain opportunities change lives, and that changing even one life is a good cause.

My plan was to contribute financially to ACS as soon as I paid off the mortgage on my home. At that point I wanted to dedicate the money that would not be going to the mortgage anymore to a scholarship. It happened that in the summer of 2023 I was in a position to do that because I guess there is some opportunity that comes with every tragedy. The way our society works is that sometimes you are rewarded monetarily for a loss. As a result, several years after my husband’s passing, I was able to pay off the mortgage on our house and had this money that I had been putting towards the house. I decided – and in the circumstances, I was the only adult making the decisions – it was the right time to start a scholarship.

I realize that ACS is not the same. It was so small after the reopening, and it was very different. The leadership has changed, the social context has changed, and the economic context has changed since we were there. But I’ve always felt, and from what my parents who still live in Sofia have told me, that it still is one of the places where kids can have a good education, something that is not always true for all other schools.

What impact do you envision your scholarship will have on the student recipient? A transformative experience like the one you once had perhaps?

My hope is that the scholarship would be a launching pad for the student recipient, like in some ways it was a launching pad for me. I hope that whatever his goals are, this experience brings him closer to achieving them. And even if he is not aware of his goals yet, I hope that he has a high quality education. As a parent, I think that’s what we want for our kids: a high quality education that they can do with whatever they wish with going forward. Whether his experience is transformative or not – you know, maybe he’ll have a transformative experience after he graduates – I hope he receives a high quality education and I hope it is a good experience.

Thinking of our goals or my goals back when we were students here, I was probably just hoping to make friends and not miss my family too much, so not very ambitious goals, yet, in a way, very ambitious goals.

Yes, exactly. Make friends, feel accepted, feel recognized and seen, right? Learn something, be challenged intellectually. I think that’s what we want for our kids now. So that’s what I want for him. I want that to be within reach for his family.

You touched upon the values of an ACS education and also values that are taught here at ACS such as critical thinking. What else do you hope students learn nowadays, here and everywhere really?

I hope that they learn how to be critical thinkers, but most of all, I hope that they learn that service is an important responsibility for everyone. They can interpret service any way they want. I don’t think I learned this in school. I learned it later. But I hope that along with critical thinking, there is a service element that the College can teach its students as well. Because in many ways, I think it is a privileged environment to be in. And with privilege comes a responsibility to have an awareness of that privilege and not take it for granted. It doesn’t mean that they have to give back, I don’t think that. I think each of us should interpret service any way we want. But I think if we’re encouraged to think about How we can serve our community, how we can serve our families, this will help us grow and find meaning in what we do.

I remember going to one school in Mladost and trying to tutor back when we were students at ACS.

Glad to report that this is still a thing. In ESL classes, 8th graders do a series of visits to neighboring schools, most recently 39th School, and teach them English through various projects – it used to be creating illustrated fairy tales together, lately it has been board games – and then the kids from the other schools visit our campus.

Well, I’m glad to hear that. To me tutoring was an important experience. And I’m glad that the College is still prioritizing this type of outreach. I now know that on the back end, there’s a lot of effort, organizing and setting up. There needs to be a commitment to this sort of relationship from the leadership of the College. Along with critical thinking and being exposed to the idea that service is important, I also hope that the College gives everyone a fascination with learning and how much there is to learn, that learning is exciting.

Did it ever occur to you as a student that you may one day be in position to support the school and its mission financially or in any way?

Not as a student, maybe as a college student, I thought that if I get a degree in teaching English, maybe I’ll go back and teach at ACS.

That would be amazing. Or you could do professional development training with faculty. What are some vivid memories you keep of your time at ACS?

I think the memory that is one of the most vivid memories involved Miss Davis, our biology teacher. Do you remember Miss Davis?

Of course, I absolutely worshiped her.

So she did labs with us in biology, remember? (I do.) I remember the lab with the different kinds of beaks. She put toothpicks in the grass and some of us had spoons, others sticky tape and we had to pick them up to understand the evolution of the beaks. But the whole idea that you can do a hands-on lab! We’d never done this in our elementary education, nobody did labs. I thought to myself, Оh my goodness, is that what education can look like?

I also remember Miss Moran, even though she was with us for one year only, because of her very high expectations. I will never forget how strict she was, this tiny woman, but I just appreciated how she really wanted us to think.

And I also remember us going to an Outward Bound experience in Rila – to Malyovitsa. It was so much fun doing all these rock climbing exercises and the ropes and the zip line. And I remember that there was Nirvana being blasted all the time. Yes, these sort of out of school activities, I remember them being fun, lots of fun.

And what advice would you give other alumni considering giving back?

It is more of a reflection than a piece of advice. But I do think that a group effort, say the Class of 1997 all contributing to something, can make contributions feel more impactful. If I can contribute say $300 a month, it may feel like nothing. I think that if we were encouraged to join such an effort and we knew each month what it was and what it was going to be used for, I think that would help. So going forward, it would appeal to me to know that I was part of a class initiative.

It would be great to see a variety of projects that need funding, if there is something specific that would appeal to people: for example, if there is a project with an environmental focus, which I really care about, or a journalism focus, where maybe we have peers with careers who would feel like contributing.

I would love to contribute to community service or social justice oriented projects. I would really love to see the collaboration with School #39 in Mladost continue and expand to other schools nearby.

I like how GoFundMe campaigns always include a goal, too. Rather than just asking for contributions, state why these people need $7,500 and track the progress towards that goal. Making it more concrete so that each of our contributions feels more impactful, I am hoping, will motivate our peers to contribute.

What makes you happy? What inspires you?

My kids make me happy and they inspire me. They inspire me because they challenge me. You probably feel this too, but becoming a parent, your actions have such an immediate impact and that is both good and bad. Sometimes I can barely hold it together and at the same time, I’m deeply aware I’m impacting these innocent souls. They are just so funny, so themselves, so unique. It’s inspiring to constantly be learning about who they are. I am savoring the spirit of their lives today, while they’re still living with me, before they go on to college. And I feel like even if I don’t remember it, there’ll be something new tomorrow, maybe later today.

My job also makes me happy. The kids are definitely first but my job is very important. I feel so privileged to have a job that brings me joy.

What are you passionate about?

I care a lot about social justice. In the United States, I’ve learned a lot about violence and oppression. Before coming here, I think I was only vaguely aware of the concept of social justice. Of course there is a lot of injustice in Bulgaria. It just looks a little different. But I feel that here in the United States, I’ve learned the vocabulary. I’ve learned more about what that is. And I see my work as contributing to social justice, if indirectly. It is focused on equity, and that inspires me a lot. Before, my work was focused on serving multilingual students, students from immigrant families. Part of what really motivates me and inspires me, a lot of what I think about is, What can we do to address injustice and work towards social justice. I am grateful for learning about what that is and how it manifests itself in our society, in our education systems, and in our working environment. Sometimes it makes me despondent, hopeless. And then I have to bring myself back. It’s the same with climate. I try not to be hopeless that the world is burning, you know. And so I try to think about how I can make a small difference with my individual actions on an everyday basis.

Which is the most interesting place you’ve been to?

The most interesting place I’ve been to is Australia, where my sister lives. I’ve been to Australia a couple of times already, and it is remarkable. The birds are different there, the trees are different, everything’s different.

If you could change one thing about school, what would it be?

If I could change one thing, I want each child to see themselves reflected in what they’re learning. I want them to see themselves. I want them to see themselves as a scientist, to see themselves as a writer, as a mathematician. That’s what I want.